Ratings: The world just doesn't care about Paris Hilton anymore

By Reality TV World staff, 06/03/2011

Paris Hilton is clearly just not that hot with American TV viewers anymore.

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Hilton's new The World According to Paris reality series premiered to underwhelming ratings on Oxygen on Wednesday night, drawing only 409,000 total viewers and 274,000 viewers in the Adults 18-49 demographic, Entertainment Weeklyreported.

While Oxygen isn't a ratings powerhouse, The World According to Paris' premiere ratings are disappointing even by the women's cable network's fairly modest standards.

In March, All About Aubrey -- a reality series following Aubrey O'Day, the former lead singer of Danity Kane, the all-girl band that was formed on MTV's Making the Band reality show -- drew 724,000 viewers for its premiere, while April's debut of the second season of Oxygen's Love Games: Bad Girls Need Love Too reality dating show averaged 1.255 million viewers.

Love Games is a spinoff of Bad Girls Club, the network's top-rated The Real World-like series which follows a group of young women with a history of outrageous behavior as they live together and attempt to control their emotions. January's premiere of Bad Girls Club's sixth season drew 1.7 million viewers, Entertainment Weekly reported.

The World According to Paris marks Hilton's second attempt to recapture some of the ratings success she and co-star Nicole Richie enjoyed on The Simple Life, which drew over 13 million viewers when it debuted on Fox on 2003.

The series made Hilton so popular that NBC even aired I Want To Be A Hilton, a reality competition which starred Hilton's mother Kathy Hilton and featured a group of contestants competing for a prize package that would allow them to "live like a Hilton" for a year.

But after three seasons, declining ratings and a "full schedule" caused Fox to drop the reality series in late 2005 -- resulting in E! picking upThe Simple Life for two additional seasons before canceling it in 2007.

The following year, Hilton -- who became known for her frequently-uttered "that's hot" catchphrase during The Simple Life -- returned to TV via Paris Hilton's My New BFF, a reality competition which aired on MTV and featured young men and women competing to become her "new best friend."

In addition to the two U.S. seasons which aired on MTV, Hilton also starred in two international My New BFF editions which were filmed in London and Dubai and broadcast in the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates.